Tag Archives: twitter

Lately, Twitter has been paying more and more attention to making the UI of both its website as well as its mobile apps as intuitive for the end users as possible. The micro-blogging platform has revamped its design several times since its inception, but let’s face it, if you’re one of those who follow too many people, even Twitter can’t help you. Your whole Timeline can turn into a disorderly jingle-jangle, making it hard to keep a tab on the important stuff – people in your timeline, the important hashtags, all those mentions and whatnot. Third-party twitter client Tame aims to give you a helping hand with all of this. With the tagline of "The social web is too chaotic. Time to Tame.it!", it aims to do so by ridding your timeline of all the unwanted stuff, presenting only the content that's most relevant to you.
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Have you ever wondered when was the first tweet ever jotted down on Twitter? It was March 21st, 2006 and the author was Jack Dorsey - one of the co-founders of the company that has now evolved into one of the most revered and influential ones in social media history. The micro-blogging platform has since then become a one-stop shop for journalists, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, authors, industry insiders and tech junkies to keep track of various world-changing trends and news. But lets face it, Twitter’s integrated search engine fails when it comes to letting you find specific tweets posted by you or by other Twitter users. That’s why social analytics firm Topsy has taken the matters in its own hands to let you find tweets from Twitter's very beginning. Topsy recently announced that it now houses every tweet that was ever posted to Twitter since its inception, so we decided to take a deeper look by ourselves and see how it works.
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Brevity is the soul of wit, and it's also important if you tweet a lot. Twitter's 140 character limit is often a challenge, especially if you're retweeting or quoting a tweet. The struggle to remain comprehensible, not misquote someone, and add enough reference that people know what you're tweeting about is one that has many pulling their hair out. Tweetshort is a tiny web app that helps us shorten our tweets so that they fit in the 140 character limit, much like previously reviewed iOS app TweetShrink. The tool lets you type in your tweet and then shrinks it the best it can. Shrinking is done in much the same way we would do it, i.e. dropping out certain characters from a word, using numbers to replace words where possible, and using shorter, misspelled versions of words that are commonly used on the internet.
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Opinion is something that everyone is quite willing to provide at all times. This has led to the rise of many successful social networks because If you take away all the additional aspects from these popular services, they are pretty much all about people broadcasting their opinions or asking for advice from their friends. There are already apps like Thumb and Blurtopia that allow users to seek advice from people they know, or even from the general public. In such apps, however, you have to wait for a considerable number of people to respond to your poll, which can take several days, if not weeks. vs. is an iOS app that lets you completely skip this wait, and can help you assess any keyword’s relative popularity in mere seconds. Using the app, you can pit any two keywords against each other, and based on recent activity on Twitter, vs. calculates a comparison score for each.
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You can now start counting the days down to the end of Google Reader and be thankful that Feedly launched its own separate web service to fill the gap. Feedly is what I'll be using come July 1, 2013 but for those who are still looking for an RSS reader, time is running out. Fortunately, the options aren't limited and FlowReader is yet another RSS reader service that you could switch to once Google Reader closes its doors. It's not just a feed reader though; in addition to letting you import your feeds from Google Reader, the service can also connect with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, allowing you to view updates from each. Users can also post to Facebook and Twitter from within FlowReader simultaneously. It also has a 'save for later' feature that allows you to mark stories in your feed for later reading.
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With social networking sites introducing new features on an almost weekly basis, our online lives are finally going towards being streamlined. You can simultaneously post on Twitter and Facebook, while popular photo sharing apps like Instagram come with some impressive social media integration as well. When everything is converging, it seems reasonable to have services that are capable of combining your social networks without making you leave any of them. In the past, we have covered a few such services like Yoono for web and Cloze for iOS, but such services very rarely offer a news feed that truly combines updates from all of your accounts. Even if they do, the whole thing is often a complete mess and you end up missing several important posts. Fuse: Social takes care to keep things simple while offering a feed combining posts from Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than just showing updates, what sets Fuse apart is that it even lets you use almost every major feature of these social networks.
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Analytics, for a long time were something that only webmasters were interested in. Unless you had your own website or blog, chances were you did not need them. All that changed with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and analytics became relevant for everyone. Neither Facebook nor Twitter users are starved for such services; the internet is littered with big names like HootSuite and several smaller ones that will tell you how many 'likes' a Facebook post received, how many new followers you gained, how many times something you tweeted has been retweeted, and more. If analytics interest you, you'll be pleased to know that Twitter has made its analytics publicly available to everyone, to graph out the number of new followers, unfollows, and retweets etc. over a timeline. They aren't very sophisticated just yet, and aren't live either; aggregate data takes 6 hours to appear, and it seems it's reporting the number of clicks on links inaccurately at the moment. Your data can be exported in CSV and XLS formats. If you've used Google Analytics, you won't be impressed but this is Twitter, and it measures different variables along different parameters.
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Every photographer starts out as an amateur one and with phones sporting such excellent quality cameras, just about everyone with a smartphone is an amateur photographer these days. You can discount people who take pictures of food and their pets, but there are some truly amazing pictures taken and shared on Twitter and Instagram everyday. Dotspin is a service for protecting the rights to photos taken by amateur photographers as well as a place for photography enthusiasts to have their photos reviewed by experts and voted on by a community that shares their interest. It works on a surprisingly simple concept: most people share photos via Twitter and Instagram, and both these services allow you to add hashtags to your posts. Dotspin asks that once you've signed up for the service, you add the #dotspin tag to what you share online, which will prompt the service to add your image to their database where it will be accompanied by a license for how it can be used.
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One can certainly understand Twitter’s reasoning behind limiting tweets to 140 characters, but there are times when you just have to say something that refuses to fit inside anything less than 150 or 160 characters. If you are on Android, there are a plethora of apps capable of letting users post tweets that are longer than 140 characters. Owners of the iPhone can enjoy some workarounds to the issue as well, with apps like the previously covered TweetAmplius. If you think about the whole issue though, there is another way of looking at it as well. Rather than bypassing the limit, what if there was some way of somehow bringing your tweet within 140 characters without losing any of its meaning? This is the approach adopted by TweetShrink for iPhone. The app uses an intelligent algorithm to reduce the word count of tweets before they are posted to your account.
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Twitter has just redesigned TweetDeck’s web interface. The change is noticeable the second you sign in to the service; the top bar has been repositioned to the left, and can be expanded and collapsed. You can compose a new tweet, add more columns and search Twitter from the top three buttons. The sidebar can expand to reveal the name of the columns you've added and the number of unread/new tweets in each column, your lists, and the search box. The columns you add are all represented by icons and should be easy to identify, unless they're for a search, which is represented by a magnifying glass icon and is almost the same as the Search icon itself. The new interface also makes it easier to follow your feed when you have a large number of columns added.
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Twitter has just released an update for both its iOS and Android apps and it comes with new features, an improved interface, as well as the removal of a few features that many active Twitter users will miss. The interface change, in Twitter’s own words, gives you wider timelines across the app. This interface change is for the iPhone only, and not the iPad. More functional changes to both iOS and Android app include viewing a thumbnail of the image you’re sharing instead of the cropped-out top half only, along with the ability to preview your tweet before sending it, toggle location information on/off for it, and switch between accounts as you compose a tweet. For users running Android 4.1 or above, the updated app also brings richer notifications, complete with user avatars and markers that tell you if it's a reply, a retweet, a DM etc.
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The power of social media has changed a lot of things over the past few years, including how we share photos with others. Not a while ago, people used to send photos to their friends and family via email attachments or using instant messaging services, but since the inception of social media sites like Facebook & Twitter as well as photo-focused services like Flickr, Picasa and Instagram, things aren't the same, as anyone can now share their favorite pictures with others in an instant. Though if you want to download photos already stored on social media, try Social Downloader. It's a small Windows app that lets you backup your Facebook and Instagram photos to your local drive. In addition to the images you've uploaded to the site and the ones you've been tagged in, you can also download photos uploaded by your friends and the ones they are tagged in, as long as the uploaders' privacy settings allow that.
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There's no doubting the importance of social media these days, but it can be an extreme distraction for many of us, keeping us from being productive by switching to those Facebook and Twitter tabs all the time. For many of us, the mailbox is where we spend a significant time of the day while at work, and apps like Mailbox and services like Mailstrom are some of our favorite ways for dealing with email when it starts to become too overwhelming. Though wouldn't it be nice if you could also keep an eye on your social media accounts right form your inbox, without having to switch to their tabs? PowerInbox is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer that integrates with Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail, and lets you add apps for services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more to it. PowerInbox adds a sidebar to your email inbox and shows you your feeds for each of the services you've added directly there. It also allows you to see icons for emails sent by services it recognizes. Read More

Staying safe online is no longer a simple matter of ensuring you don’t visit the wrong website. Threats to your personal identity can come in any form; malicious apps, phishing scams, and hacked or hijacked accounts. Hacked accounts are now a major threat for the simple reason that there is just so much to hack; emails, cloud storage accounts, social media accounts, and what not. For this reason alone, companies like Apple, and Microsoft have introduced two-factor authentication for Apple IDs, and for Outlook, respectively. Google has long supported the feature as well and now, Twitter has become the latest major internet company to join the list. If you've connected your phone to your Twitter account, you can set up two-factor now if it’s available for your account (the feature is being rolled out slowly). Here’s the step-by-step procedure.
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There are plenty of tools for all platforms that can be used to manage your followers on Twitter. On one hand, there are services that let you trim down the list of people you follow, while other apps raise the alarm as soon as someone tries to quietly unfollow you. As Vine is still not too old, we haven’t seen a lot of similar services for it just yet. Another contributing factor might be Vine’s iOS-exclusiveness. Thankfully though, now there is a very uncomplicated way of finding out if someone has recently unfollowed you on Vine, or if that’s just your paranoia kicking in. Followers on Vine is not a feature-rich app by any means, but it is enough to let Vine users keep track of their followers if they are conscious about keeping their Follower/Following ratio in a certain range. The app can also be used to find the people you follow who aren't following you back on Vine, and even see a special list of your new followers.
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Self destructing messages and notes à la Mission:Impossible franchise have been around on the internet for a while now, and services like SnapChat and Facebook poke have been offering such option in several forms. Though ever wished you could send a tweet that could self-destruct after a set time, without you having to remember to manually delete it later? It is a new concept in its entirety recently introduced by Efemr. If you're thinking why would anyone want to destroy their own tweets, there can be many use case scenarios, one of which is a limited-time sales promotion. Whatever it may be, Efemr has a lot of potential in letting you post self-destructing tweets that are automatically deleted after a specified time.
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It might not have received the warmest reception upon its introduction, but Facebook timeline is actually quite useful for going through your older posts. In addition to Facebook, many other social networks and web services save your past posts in chronological order as well, so that you can view your previous activities quite easily. Twitter has also made it possible for users to download all their past tweets, which highlights the importance of social media history. This aspect of social networks is something we are all aware of, but rarely call into action. Timehop is an iOS app that offers a convenient and effortless way of staying in touch with your social networking history. It creates time capsules containing all the posts you have ever published on the present date over the past years. Timehop also lets you connect with your friends who are using the app to view their past activities. The app has been around in the App Store for a long time, but its latest update has added Dropbox integration to the mix, which lets users save their old photos to the cloud, and also serves as a good way of reminiscing about your past Dropbox uploads.
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Productivity is all about management and scheduling. And if you’re doing everything on a timely basis, why not have the ability to communicate with friends and family on a planned time? That’s what Schemes aims to address. In short, it is a very simple yet handy Android app that lets you schedule four types of outgoing communications: SMS, emails, Tweets, and Facebook statuses. The best thing is that all of this is done without any unnecessarily complicated steps. By the way, did you know that the name of this app is actually an acronym? Read on to find out what it means! Read More

Most people nowadays have more online friends than real life ones. Some even keep adding new friends as if they are in a competition where the player with the highest number will win the round. Speaking of numbers, TwentyOne is a one-of-a-kind Windows 8 and RT app, with a Windows Phone version as well, that lets you aggregate your 21 favorite social media friends from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so you may keep a tab on their online happenings under one roof. As the app's name suggests, you can add up to 21 contacts from each social network; assuming you’re using all your slots, that could max it up to 63 contacts in total, provided you choose a different group of people from each service. The app monitors your interaction with your friends and in turn recommends new friends based on your likes, dislikes and comments on their updates. Let’s take a look.
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For some reason, Twitter chose to make their new #music service really tough to access, with iOS being the only smartphone platform having an official client for it. Even Android has been ignored so far, which means there is little chance of #music appearing in the WP Store for a long time. Apart from lack of support for various platforms, there are also a bunch of region restrictions that have so far limited the availability of #music to only a lucky few users when seen at a global scale. Despite all these adversities, a Windows Phone developer has somehow managed to bring an unofficial #music client to WP7 and WP8. #trending displays the latest charts from #music, keeping users in the loop regarding the tracks gaining popularity on Twitter. You can listen to a 30-second snippet of all the listed songs, and even download these samples as ringtones for your device.
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About Addictivetips

AddictiveTips is a tech blog focused on helping users find simple solutions to their everyday problems. We review the best desktop, mobile and web apps and services out there, in addition to useful tips and guides for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Read more...